July 30th

Hotels are getting much more sophisticated about the music they play in their lobbies, restaurants, spas and pools. Properties are increasingly working with music-design companies, compiling separate playlists for different spaces and particular times of day. They’re even zeroing in on the optimal number of beats per minute. –How luxury hotels lure you with music

Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?…..But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies. –The web we have to save (1h7d)